I’ve started a Qt based library for reading ebooks in a generic manner. It is called lebookread! It is it’s early stages. So far I have it supporting epub, palmdoc pdb, ztxt pdb, tcr, and rb files. I plan to support ereader pdb, mobi, and plucker files in the near future.

The main goal of this project is to make reading ebooks easy for Qt based projects. I’ve chose to write the library in C++. This is also my first attempt at writing a library and it shows. I hope that it will be used by Sigil.

The real motivation of writing lebook read is I really want a good light weight ebook reader. The current offering have issues. I want something that is a bit more advanced in it’s rendering than FBReader. I also didn’t want anything with as large a dependency list as calibre. So, I plan on using lebookread to write my own ebook viewer.

I’ve added a metadata reader for the eReader format. However, eReader supports 3 ways to set the metadata in the file. 1) In the pdb header (only supports setting a short title). 2) In the metadata section of the file (supports the most information: title, author, publisher, copyright, isbn). 3) Embedded in the text as a comment. 2 and 3 are only accessible if the book does not contain DRM (or has been unlocked, but Calibre does not support this). 3 is not supported at all with this metadata reader. The reader first tires 2 then falls back to 1 if the book is DRMed or if the metadata section is non-existent.

Two new input and output formats have been added. ztxt and palmdoc. They are both pdb formats like eReader. For input the pdb input plugin will automatically determine the internal format and call the appropriate code path. For output the default is palmdoc but there is an option –format that can be used to change it to any other supported pdb output format (ztxt is the only other currently). The format option is also available in the conversion dialog in the GUI.

Speaking of conversion in the GUI. It now works. There are all new dialogs for single and bulk conversion. Pretty much anything that can be done using the command line ebook-convert can be done in the GUI. Bulk, single and auto conversion are all complete and working. Auto conversion will also honor a users preferences for formats set for the device interface plugin.